ISLANDS is Elizabeth McIntosh’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, while an ‘island’ is a piece of sub-continental land surrounded by water. Comprised of her most recent paintings, there is a suggestion here of paintings as metaphorical islands. Many of the works in this show were created during her residency this past summer on the remote continental island of Fogo, Newfoundland, and elements of these works are taken directly from that visual environment and its histories. Almost directly south of Fogo, but well below the equator, lies the oceanic, tropical island of Barbados, which has featured in Elizabeth’s previous work and where she has personal connections. Islands are distinct, but ‘island culture’ and ‘island time’ connect them psychically, despite geographic, racial, historical and political differences.

Elizabeth’s work is deftly articulated through multiple painting vocabularies. Colourful geometric abstractions ebb through pattern and into graphic, representational compositions, shifts which are led by her continuous questioning of contemporary painting practices. Her recent work is based in a systematic process of digital collage, often beginning from a growing image archive developed over several years. This visual cache includes fragments from historical paintings, but is not limited to art history. It also consists of images selected from her own previous work, iPad doodles, and drawings from photographs of her own life. Digitally composed, these layers of the art historical, the personal, and the autobiographical become intuitively and formally interconnected, on equal ground. The acts of her digital cutting are often left visible, and Elizabeth embraces these incidents as generative, both formally and conceptually. The rudimentary selection tools of Photoshop are allowed to leave their trace, defining the coastlines of each layer as smooth or rugged.

This instinctive and improvisational process both changes and remains the same from work to work. Elizabeth’s gestures—simultaneously direct but at a remove—articulate a distrust of art history, troubling the reverence for authority of the expressive, masterful, gendered gesture. Expressed by the physical material of paint, each painting’s surface becomes its own content, still psychically connected to the others. What occurs when an algorithmic decision to articulate difference accrues impasto?

‘“We are volcanoes,” Ursula Le Guin once remarked. “When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” The new voices that are undersea volcanoes erupt in what was mistaken for open water, and new islands are born; it’s a furious business and a startling one. The world changes.’

Rebecca Solnit, “A Short History of Silence”, in The Mother of All Questions, 2017

The Pacific, the inaugural exhibition at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, brings together artists from countries in and around the Pacific Ocean.

The exhibition considers the Pacific Ocean as a shared and connected space. It explores the idea that although the Pacific is an immense body of water there is a strong sense that it is a space of connection between peoples that live beside or are surrounded by it — that it brings people together rather than separates them. In contrast, much of the narrative around the Atlantic Ocean has historically perceived it as a space of distancing and division.

In thinking about the Pacific Ocean as a shared space we can consider the histories and contemporary concerns as linked while also being specific to each place. The show will include works that address environmental issues such as rising sea levels, nuclear contamination, the impact of industry and the built environment on the ocean. It will also consider human migration and the experiences of migrants. Finally it will touch upon our deep personal and spiritual bonds to the waters of the Pacific.

Some of the work in the exhibition include excerpts from Charles Lim’s Sea State, which was shown at the 56th Venice Biennale at the Singapore Pavilion, Paula Schaafhausen’s Ebbing Tagaloa, an installation made of sand and coconut oil, and Khvay Samnang’s Air, a video made in the Fukushima Prefecture shortly after the nuclear disaster occurred. Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan will be making a large site-specific installation in the gallery in the weeks leading up to the opening.

Curated by Cate Rimmer, The Pacific extends the research begun in the multi-part exhibition The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea. It will include the work of Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan (Philippines), Taloi Havini (Papua New Guinea), Charles Lim (Singapore), Genevieve Robertson (Canada), Jane Chang Mi (Hawaii), Khvay Samnang (Cambodia), Simryn Gill (Malaysia/Australia), Michael Drebert (Canada), Paula Schaafhausen (Samoa), Kalisolaite ‘Uhila (Tonga/New Zealand), Evan Lee (Canada), Beau Dick (Canada). There will be a series of talks and events scheduled around the opening and during the run of the exhibition that will include artists, migrant communities, social historians and scientists.

Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens: When the Guests Are Not Looking
January 20 - February 3, 2018
Audain Gallery

When the Guests Are Not Looking is a new installation and performance project by Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens that examines audience expectations towards artists, artworks and art institutions. In their collaborative multidisciplinary practice, Ibghy and Lemmens investigate the material, affective and sensory dimensions of experience, and the ways in which the logic of economy infiltrates the most intimate aspects of our lives.

This project extends from a publication by the artists related to work, productivity and idleness. It is structured around Diderot's Rameau's Nephew (a satirical late 18th century text) which presents a dialogue between a philosopher and a vagabond that offers two opposing views on work: the philosopher loves unconfined thought, while the vagabond is an idler, buffoon, actor, and musician who avoids sites of production. Diderot's text provides an alternate view within the Enlightenment, a period often portrayed as the foundation of our contemporary obsession with productivity.

SFU students will workshop and interpret the publication through improvisational performances during the course of the project. The performers will inhabit the character of Rameau’s nephew (the vagabond) and their performances will be sporadic so that visitors to the gallery may or may not witness a performance, and may or may not be aware that what they are witnessing is a performance. When the Guests Are Not Looking addresses the social demand for individuals to perform within the conditions of post-Fordist labour regimes and neoliberal social processes, and for the gallery to similarly “perform” within these circumstances.

Based in Durham-Sud, Quebec, Ibghy and Lemmens have shown their work extensively nationally and internationally.

Panelists will consider how artists read history through literature, literature through performance, performance through history. The cultural and socio-geographic contexts within which Denis Diderot and Hugo Carillo wrote will be discussed, alongside the current cultural and social climate within which Ibghy, Lemmens and Ramírez-Figueroa revisit their texts.

Andrew Dadson
'Site For Still Life'
October 13 - December 31, 2017
Preview: October 12, 7-9pm

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the most comprehensive solo exhibition in a public gallery to date of work by Vancouver-based artist Andrew Dadson.

Dadson’s practice engages with the notion of boundaries in relation to space and time, primarily through investigations with materials, process and abstraction. Comprising new, ambitious large-scale paintings, film and installation, this exhibition presents a major statement by this young artist of propositions core to his practice.

Central to the exhibition is House Plants (2017), a new installation where plant forms are sprayed a single colour and lit by intense lamps, akin to artificial sunlight. Sitting on a raised platform staged in the gallery, this large-scale piece echoes with contemporary “green” walls in Vancouver’s architecture, hinting at moments when nature is co-opted into urban space, connecting to the remarkable landscape for which Vancouver is arguably best known. For the first time, using a biodegradable white paint, the forms dissolve into the gallery environment, cast shadows of red and blue light introducing colour where there appears to be none. As the organic matter grows over the duration of the exhibition, the unifying painted colour will crack and splinter, wew shoots emerging to reveal fresh, natural colours, reinforcing Dadson’s key proposition to expose temporary and perceptual shifts.

In addition to this ambitious installation is a series of new monochromatic paintings, demonstrating fresh twists on Dadson’s familiar oeuvre. These large-scale paintings are created with colours that are poured, spread out, layered and scraped towards the edges, the final layer of white leaving glimpses of other colours beneath the surface, in a cross-reference to the traditions of American abstract painting.

The modestly scaled White Restretch with Dirt (2017) is part of an ongoing sequence for Dadson. Here however, instead of colour emerging along its edges, we see hints of earth and mud, creating a visual correspondence to House Plants. Alongside pigment, natural materials have been incorporated to shape and form the piece, reinforcing a connection to landscape and the sense of fluidity inherent in such environments. Nothing including the work itself, Dadson seems to suggest, is ever in stasis.

In contrast to the B.C. Binning Gallery where ideas and forms are presented in all-white, the Alvin Balkind Gallery is painted black and in darkness. Here. a newly remade twin 16mm film work; Sunrise/Sunset (2017) displays the artist’s research into painting techniques in relation to those of photography. Using two projectors that simultaneously show a single film threaded between them, the piece depicts the sun concurrently rising and setting on opposite walls. In an ongoing loop, the space of a day is compressed into a revolving moment. The result is a play on light and dark, presence and absence, a temporary black hole, and brackets the gallery as a companion to House Plants while acting as another representation of light and the natural world. As well as locating this within the broader cycles of change and renewal, the film smartly continues Dadson’s preoccupation with evolving shifts and the very materiality and processes of making.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Phil Lind as presenting sponsor; wings+horns as major sponsor and additional support from Jan and Mark Ballard.

Lyse Lemieux FULL FRONTAL

Oct 13, 2017 - Mar 25, 2018

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Lyse Lemieux.

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Lyse Lemieux, incorporating two new inter-related large-scale commissions across the gallery façade and off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station.

Lemieux’s artistic practice is often described as one focused on drawing, balanced between figuration and abstraction. Whether working in small (and until very recently, private) notebooks, on sheets of paper, or across the “page” of the gallery façade and the glass panelled architecture of the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Lemieux’s working process is inseparable from the forms she creates, which are almost always in reference to the human figure.

At CAG, large-scale black ellipses literally contain and obscure the building, redolent of familiar forms, both revealing and concealing the architecture on which they’re displayed. But while part of the artist’s composition across the façade might suggest something figural, it equally refers to the body by proxy: patterned sections recalling the garments that clothe it or fabric drapes, as the design itself wraps the building.

Lemieux is haunted by certain forms—like the black tunic she wore throughout Catholic school as a girl or the pleated skirt—motifs that reappear again and again throughout her work. Deeply aware of the significance of clothing, the way it declares or masks our subject positions, constrains and liberates us, the artist thinks like a patternmaker: she sees the body through the cut of a skirt, the slope of a shoulder seam. While the works at CAG appear to hem in the building, suggestive of what and how something is enclosed, by contrast, at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, the artwork appears pulled back, offering glimpses of what lies behind or underneath.

Joining together the two works, the title, FULL FRONTAL, is a description of the works’ enveloping and reclaiming of the space of the architecture which provides its support. Simultaneously subtle, yet literally in your face, it is here we sense the solution to the presentation of the private in the public realm, Lemieux’s stance asserting the individual and the gendered within the bland, homogeneous surroundings of this part of the city.

At the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, work is presented by CAG in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC. Lemieux is grateful for the support of Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. FULL FRONTAL is also supported by Proper Design.

Celebrating the excessive abundance of the archive, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is concerned with language, depictions of the woman reader as an artistic genre and the potential of reading as performed resistance. Central to the exhibition, Rereading Room is a reconstruction of the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore (1973-1996) in the second iteration of a project by Alexandra Bischoff. Thirteen artists, writers, theorists and researchers have been invited to occupy the installation as The Readers for the duration of the exhibition, working with and against the inventory by reading, annotating and supplementing the collection to form a dossier of responses. A textile multiple by Kathy Slade will wrap and adorn The Readers and lingering visitors. Lisa Robertson finds in Baudelaire’s dandy a tangible presence for old women in public spaces. A multitude of artworks dating from 1968 to 2017 explore language as a medium and material including works by Allyson Clay, Judith Copithorne, Gathie Falk, Jamelie Hassan, Germaine Koh, Laiwan, Sara Leydon, Divya Mehra, Adrian Piper, Kristina Lee Podesva, Anne Ramsden, Evelyn Roth and Elizabeth Zvonar, among others, that are drawn from the Belkin Art Gallery collection, the Kamloops Art Gallery, SFU Galleries, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is the first of four exhibitions based upon the Belkin Art Gallery’s research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds – feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, access to health services and housing – began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture. Noting the resurgence of art practice involved with social activism and an increasing interest in the 1970s from younger producers, the Belkin has connected with diverse archives and activist networks to bring forward these histories, to commission new works of art and writing and to provide a space for discussion and debate.

The Beginning with the Seventies project is made possible with the generous support of the Vancouver Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, our Belkin Curator’s Forum members and the Department of Canadian Heritage Young Canada Works Program.

The story of contemporary painting in Canada is constantly under revision, and for good reason—dynamic and influential art practices, wildly differing opinions, strongly held beliefs, and high expectations, make for a charged atmosphere in art schools, studios, and public and private galleries. Within the community of painters, strong ideas give shape to new modes of painting, new techniques and new dogma that are in turn shared, debated, tested and critiqued in studios across the country.

Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting offers an insight into two distinctly different modes of painting that have come to dominate contemporary painting in this country. The origins of both can be effectively traced back to the 1970s, to a moment when the continued existence of painting was hotly debated. Within that debate two new strategies were devised, one that proposed the possibility of conceptual painting—a highly refined notion of painting that emerged from and returned to the idea—and a second, ambivalent proposition that valued actions and materials over ideas—in short, doing and making were pitted against ideas and concepts.

This exhibition traces the legacy of that debate and documents the work of 31 artists who have been largely responsible for the strong revival that painting now enjoys in this country. With work by artists from Halifax to Victoria and many places in-between, this exhibition offers a convincing survey of the lively debate that makes painting relevant and meaningful today.

Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting is curated by Vancouver Art Gallery Senior Curator, Bruce Grenville, and artist and Emily Carr University of Art + Design professor David MacWilliam. It will be accompanied by a 112-page publication with texts by the two curators.